Who needs the system's default calculator anyway?

[pier4r]

(01-03-2018 11:29 PM)TheKaneB Wrote:  That said, if I were you, I'd definitely implemented that thing in C++ with OpenMP. I bet I could reduce the run time from the 8h of the prime / shield to a few minutes on a modest quad core i5 pc

Sure, but it is not needed for me. A need has a set of factors to fulfill, if I needed speed I would do something similar. The point is that the calculators that I have push me to do little math problems , larger programming environments are not that stimulating . Therefore I use what I have because otherwise I wouldn't have the same problems .

It is like, I see the 50g and I think "oh is not running, what could I do on it?". I don't think the same with python because my computer is running programs nonetheless , so meh.

That seems trivial but it is a super incentive to do programming and math. Incentives make the difference and different people get motivated by different things .

Then again to be fast on a modern quad core is not that difficult with a capable programming language just because the hardware is fast. What makes the difference is the input. Scale the input enough and then it gets interesting. What is interesting is the algorithm, rather than speed on faster hw.

What I would do with a more capable programming language, of course one off things (so no prime replacement), are massive things . Like reading the blockchain of bitcoin to search closed recurring cycles of payments. That is a massive problem.